One of the most talked-about shifts in American education was nearly unthinkable only a couple of decades ago: phone-free schools. Districts across the country are restricting or outright banning cellphone use during the school day, with the unsurprising reasoning that phones pull attention away from learning, even when they are silent. For families with standardized tests on the horizon, this shift is not just a classroom management story, but connects directly to how well a student can concentrate, study, and ultimately perform on crucial exams like the SAT and ACT.

Cellphone Bans Are Spreading

The push toward phone-free campuses is being driven by teachers and administrators who for years witnessed firsthand how much classroom time and attention phones consume. About seven in ten high school teachers point to student cellphone use as a major classroom distraction, more than half of public school administrators report that cellphones have hurt academic performance in their schools, and data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that 77 percent of public schools now prohibit cellphone use during class. Even public support for their view has grown, with roughly three in four American adults now backing a ban on classroom phone use for middle and high school students.

The momentum has grown quickly, both nationally and internationally: Florida became the first to enact a statewide cellphone restriction in 2023, making it a closely-watched test case, and by 2024, about 30 U.S. states had passed or formally recommended similar policies while nearly a third of countries worldwide had adopted national restrictions on the presence of phones in class.

Conflicting Research 

On one side, a multi-year study of Florida’s statewide ban found that student test scores and attendance improved in the second year of implementation, with an overall gain of roughly six-tenths of a percentile year-over-year, rising to about 1.1 percentile points when comparing the final pre-ban year directly to the second year after the policy took effect. As expected, the gains were largest in schools that had the highest rates of student phone use before the ban began, but unexpectedly were more pronounced among male students. A separate study found that a nationwide phone ban in the United Kingdom was associated with a 6.4 percent increase in national exam scores, with the strongest gains concentrated among lower-achieving students.

However, the largest and most nationally representative study of school cellphone bans to date, conducted by researchers at Stanford, Duke, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania using data from roughly 4,600 schools, found that the average effects on standardized test scores were negligible across the first three years after ban enactments, even though teachers consistently reported fewer classroom distractions once phones were locked away. Attendance and behavior were similarly unaffected in that dataset, and some smaller surveys tell a similar story—about half of students in one qualitative study reported feeling more productive during the school day, yet most reported no real change in their actual academic performance.

Possible explanations for the contradictory evidence are that the efficacy of bans depends heavily on how consistently a policy is enforced, how long it has been in place, and how much phone use existed beforehand. Removing the phone is a necessary first step toward focus, but not, by itself, a guarantee.

The Phone-Free Difference 

In phone-free classrooms, students are re-learning how to sit with a difficult problem, take detailed notes, and follow an extended lesson without a digital escape hatch, an adjustment that is rarely instant. Researchers who surveyed schools shortly after bans took effect actually found a counterintuitive, temporary uptick in perceived distraction, likely tied to withdrawal from habitual phone checking—the Stanford/Duke/Michigan/UPenn study uncovered an average 16% increase in suspensions during the first year after phone bans were enacted, a rise that didn’t retreat below the baseline until year three. A separate review in Florida also found a temporary increase in disciplinary incidents, with Stanford’s lead researcher on the project, Thomas Dee, summing up the situation as follows: “Building effective, phone-free learning environments does not appear to be a simple or quick fix.” The first several weeks tend to be the hardest, and the instinct to reach for a phone during a lull does not disappear overnight—families should expect an adjustment period rather than an immediate transformation, and should not be discouraged if the first month looks harder before it looks easier.

Effects on Standardized Tests 

Phone-free school policies intersect with standardized testing in a very concrete way. The SAT and ACT are both timed, high-stakes exams that demand extended, uninterrupted concentration across multiple hours with only short breaks between sections. The relatively new Digital SAT is 2 hours, 14 minutes long while the ACT’s length varies between 2 hours, 5 minutes, and 3 hours, 25 minutes, depending on whether optional sections are taken. Neither exam pauses for a cellphone notification, and neither rewards a student who has rarely sat undistracted with challenging problems for an extended stretch.

What Families Can Do Without Waiting for Policy Changes 

Obviously, parents need not wait for their child’s school to adopt a phone-free policy to start applying the same principle at home. Setting aside protected, distraction-free blocks of time for study, even 30 to 45 minutes without a phone in the room, accomplishes what phone-free classrooms are designed to. Students preparing for a major exam should treat their study sessions the same way a phone-free classroom treats the school day: as dedicated time where focus is the entire point, not an afterthought squeezed in between notifications.